Jeff Brown and Glenn Beck dissect the 2030 technological landscape, highlighting Google's quantum supremacy breakthrough and Amazon's $100 billion AI investment versus China's $160 billion private sector funding. They analyze 5G infrastructure risks, Huawei's data routing to Beijing, and Google's HIPAA loopholes accessing patient records. The conversation covers CRISPR's potential to cure 7,000 diseases by 2030, the ethical dangers of germline editing in China, and fears that AI-driven prediction will erode free will. Ultimately, the episode warns that while fusion energy and longevity await, humanity risks losing privacy and control to unchecked exponential growth. [Automatically generated summary]
This is one of my favorite podcasts in the last year.
In fact, it's taken a year for the two of us to get together.
This is a guy that you're going to meet has a foot in the future, both feet in the future, a clear view of the complicated world that awaits us, a world that is much, much nearer than you might realize.
The things of science fiction are coming quickly.
You will not recognize your life by 2030.
He has a couple of theories as a futurist that are pretty shocking on how fast change will come.
Things are going to be automated.
You're going to be able to change your body through automation, through implants, but also through CRISPR.
We'll be able to cure disease, and it's already here.
Industries, communication, everything will change.
The very fabric of morality is going to be challenged, which is why today's guest is so important.
He has devoted himself to the difficult questions posed by such a transformation.
What are the dangers of this technology?
What are the dangers of augmentation?
What are the dangers of AI, AGI, and ASI?
What about the meddling with your own thoughts?
Could you get somebody to vote for somebody without them knowing it?
Could you get them to buy a product?
How bad will it get?
The thing I like about him is he also talks about solutions, his stance on cryptocurrency, the idea that paper currency is going to become a thing of the past soon.
Why 5G Latency Matters for Self-Driving Cars00:13:38
He studied at the Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering Department at Purdue University.
This is the same school that produced Neil Armstrong and several other astronauts.
He's wicked, wicked smart.
He's worked in Tokyo on the leading edge of technology.
He has seen the innermost parts of Silicon Valley.
He is the editor of The Bleeding Edge and chief technology analyst for Bonner and Partners.
You are going to love Jeff Brown.
So let's start with something that was in the news that I read from IBM that it didn't happen.
And that is quantum supremacy.
Right.
First of all, explain what that is.
Sure.
So quantum supremacy has been obviously predicted for decades and decades, a half of a century, and it's the moment at which a quantum computer can outperform the most powerful classical computer on Earth.
And right now, that computer is called Summit.
It was actually Partially built by IBM, and it's one of the Department of Energy's national laboratories, and it's capable of something called 200 petaflops per second, which is just imagine football field-sized data centers full of racks and racks of very powerful computers and servers.
And the job is simply just to compute.
The most complex problems known to man, that's what that was designed for.
Football field size.
Football field size.
So you connect all of these systems together and they're one large, massive supercomputer.
And the U.S. has the most powerful supercomputer on Earth.
That's the Summit.
And for perspective, the quantum computer that was developed by Google is the size of a refrigerator.
Wow.
And there's a couple racks of equipment that kind of help orchestrate everything.
But it's not a big computing system.
It's the size of a refrigerator.
And that single computer was able to outperform Summit, the most powerful supercomputer on Earth.
And the way they tested it is they developed a very complex problem to solve.
And the quantum computer at Google solved it in 200 seconds.
200 seconds.
And Google calculated that it would take the Summit computer about 10,000 years to solve the same problem.
How do they know they got it right?
So the measure is to be able to crunch that massive amount of data and come to a conclusion.
So how does that change?
How does that change things?
It honestly, it changes everything.
The truth is, is that we'll look back on this five years from now, 10 years from now, and this will be one for the history books.
This is like a moon landing.
This is absolutely a moon landing.
And it was something that recently there were lots of people that said, oh, that's a long way down the road.
Correct.
As recently as last year, experts were saying we are a long way away from quantum supremacy.
10 years plus.
Absolutely.
And we just hit it, and it kind of went by and nobody noticed.
And this is the thing that I really wanted to have you on because we had a conversation about a year ago.
We were just happening to be in a hotel at the same time at a conference, and you and I pulled a room off to the side just to talk for a little while.
And what people, my frustration is Life is going to change so much in the next 10 years.
And it's either going to be great or it's going to be horrific.
And I don't know which, but I'm excited to find out.
But nobody's talking about it.
Nobody, when you think, when people, when I talk to people and say, no, you don't understand, 2030 is a different world.
They don't, they can't process that.
So I really want to talk to you about what does the world look like five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now.
And what are the things we should be talking about?
You know, you gave a great lecture on 5G.
And I'd love for you to explain 5G because this is the key to almost everything.
Anything that Tesla is doing with their car, it has to have 5G.
But it comes with all kinds of problems with it.
So explain just 5G.
There's so much to display.
I know.
And we should definitely come back to the significance of quantum computing.
5G is a wireless technology that's been under development for about 10 years.
And the way the industry works is that every 10 years, the industry develops standards and then starts building out the next generation of wireless network.
We started all the way back with first generation back in the 80s.
We moved to 2G in the 90s.
We moved to 3G in 2000, 4G in 2010.
And now we're ready.
In fact, we need fifth generation wireless technology because fourth generation wireless networks are congested.
If you've ever had trouble with dropped phone calls or for some reason your email won't download or if you can't actually access the internet on your phone, the network's congested.
There's not enough capacity for you to get what you need.
And that's why 5G is so important.
The difference between 4G and 5G is not like the difference between 3G and 4G, though.
Oh, this is genuinely the first revolutionary wireless technology that the world has seen since the first generation.
So this is, correct me if I'm wrong.
I think it's the jump between 4G and 5, but it may be the jump between 5 and 10.
Somebody described it as if 4G is a garden hose, 5G is the channel.
Right.
So to even make it simpler, our average speeds over a 4G wireless network are about 10 megabits per second.
The speeds that have already been demonstrated by AT ⁇ T and Verizon are one gigabit per second.
That's 100 times faster connectivity than what we're used to today over our 4G networks.
So people will look at that and go, okay, well, I mean, I could already watch Disney Plus in my car while it's moving and it's driving and you already have that.
That's not where it comes into play.
It comes into self-driving cars.
It comes into surgeries being performed by a surgeon on one side of the world and a body on the other.
In the field under a tent, you could have the world's top surgeon in New York operating on a soldier in Afghanistan with no wired network, no fiber optics, literally just transmitting over a 5G wireless network.
And the reason that's possible is not just kind of the pipe.
It's something called latency or delay.
Average latency in the U.S. is about 120 milliseconds.
That may not sound like much, but...
If you're bleeding to death.
Yeah.
Yes, and there's a robotic arm that's inside your body, you want very low latency.
Right.
Ooh, don't cut that.
Delay.
No, it's only one millisecond.
5G is only one millisecond delay.
It's like having a completely real-time connection.
If you and I were speaking through holographic images over a 5G wireless network, we couldn't tell the difference as to whether we were sitting with each other or you were on the other side of the world.
There would be no perceivable audio or visual delay in our conversation.
So what are the ramifications?
Like what technology is ready?
It just needs that piece.
What are the instant ramifications?
Five-year ramifications.
Yeah.
So one of the reasons that I think kind of the mainstream press often misunderstands this kind of technology is there are a lot of nuances.
Obviously, it takes years to build out and tens of billions of dollars to build out these 5G networks.
You probably don't know this, but we have 5G networks right here in Dallas today.
Most of Manhattan is actually covered by 5G.
Real 5G?
Real 5G operating at one gigabit per second.
The only challenge is, is it's kind of like a hotspot design.
Think about lily pads in a pond.
The entire pond isn't covered yet.
Right.
And because this needs towers everywhere.
Everywhere.
In fact, it's almost like, excuse me, you'll know this reference.
I hope I get it right.
But it's almost like the difference between Tesla and Edison on power.
Oh, yeah.
Where DC needed these little power generators everywhere.
Everywhere, yeah.
It wasn't considered plausible to be able to do.
Why is this plausible to do when it's these little transmitters, I guess they would be called?
Right, right.
Everywhere.
Right.
So the unique change in architecture is moving from what's referred to as a large cell architecture, where one transmitter could broadcast over, essentially transmit over miles, versus a smaller cell architecture where we're talking about distances of hundreds of feet, for example.
Why do that?
We have to.
One of the things that's challenging about radio frequencies, the things that we broadcast, television channels or radio channels, is they're full.
They're completely congested.
So all of those very valuable frequencies that we use for television, they've all been taken.
And 4G has taken also the valuable frequencies.
And so we have to go higher up.
Higher frequencies mean higher power.
Higher power means we need these transmission devices, these antennas, closer and closer together so we can enable some kind of contiguous coverage.
This is the lower frequency, the longer the wave.
Exactly.
The longer the wave.
Very good.
The longer the wave, the longer it will transmit.
So you don't need as much equipment.
The higher the frequency, you have to use more power and smaller waves.
While we're here on this part of it, what do you make of the people who say it's dangerous?
It's going to, being bombarded by these waves is going to kill us all.
It is a conspiracy.
And it's actually a conspiracy that has been fueled by some of the United States competitors.
Rocky Tom.
I'm saying this.
People don't believe me.
No, no, no.
That is clearly.
Absolutely.
And that's very factual.
I've read the research that's been done on rats, you know, putting a very high-powered transmitter right next to a rat, right inside of a cage.
There is absolutely no evidence that these wireless networks, whether they be 1, 2, 3, 4G, have had any negative health impact.
So 5 is higher power, but we remember we don't sleep with a 5G transmitter next to our head.
These are obviously at distance from us.
And the only one thing that I do recommend when people ask me about this is it's good to use earpods or whether they're wireless or wired earphones when you're speaking on your cell phone rather than holding your cell phone next to your head.
There's no evidence that holding your cell phone next to your head would cause any health damage.
None's been published that I've seen from credible medical research institutions, but I think it's just good practice.
Okay.
So what does the onlining of 5G mean to people?
The Impossible Decisions of Autonomous Vehicles00:06:50
So you used a great example, which is autonomous vehicles.
That latency and also the bandwidth is absolutely essential for a world of self-driving cars and taxis.
I don't think people understand the information that the cars will be able to process.
It's not your car just figuring out where to go and what's in front of it.
It will eventually know what that car is, who's in that car, who's in this car, have access to all of that information, right?
So it because it has to make a judgment at some point, if there's a problem, which way do I swerve?
Which way do I go to cause the least damage?
It's kind of one of those, what is it, the trolley experiment where you've got a trolley going down and it could kill three people this way, or you could switch tracks and kill one person over there.
What do you do?
It's got to crunch that kind of data if we're going to really, truly autonomous cars, right?
So one of the biggest debates in the industry right now amongst the technologists working on autonomous tech is how do we program the software to make those decisions?
Who do we choose, to your point?
If there's two children, two teenagers walking across the street and two grandparents across the street and one of the two groups is going to have to get hit, what's the decision to be made?
Is that one built on potential economic output of the individuals?
Is it built on our emotions about making those decisions?
It's almost an impossible decision to be.
It isn't impossible.
That's why you don't really, you know, you can't really judge people because it's a snap decision.
Right.
But this is a programmed decision.
It is a program.
We lose millions of people who die through traffic accidents on an annual basis.
Autonomous driving technology, 94% of those deaths are caused by human error.
Right.
So we can eliminate 94% of those worldwide deaths.
The lives it'll save will be extraordinary.
So while this is an incredibly complex ethical dilemma that we have to solve, and I have a theory about that, is that we may actually leave that to the AI to decide because it's such a polarizing issue.
And after all, one of the extraordinary things about artificial intelligence is you can feed it an incredible amount of information and it will make a very accurate decision, but it can't tell you how it got there.
It can consider a thousand different variables and recognize patterns that humans just can't possibly understand and come to the correct conclusion.
There's no way for us to understand which unsettling.
It is for most people.
How could we trust something when we don't understand the decision-making process that it went through?
This is one of the very unique things about artificial intelligence.
Back to the issue of the car, an average self-driving car will generate about 4,000 gigabytes of information a day.
That's the equivalent of about 1,000 high-definition movies.
1,000.
Wow.
And the reason that data is so important, and this is why Tesla is such an extraordinary company, Tesla has driven about 2 billion miles on autopilot to date.
2 billion.
Real miles on real roads, the cars driving by themselves.
Very few people recognize how much Tesla has accomplished.
The reason that data is so important is that data comes back in.
It gets fed into Tesla's artificial intelligence algorithm.
It's autonomous driving tech.
And it makes it smarter.
So is that all proprietary?
It is proprietary to Tesla.
So that makes them the difference between Google and Yahoo at the beginning stages where.
Yes, they have they have an unbelievable moat.
Waymo, the self-driving division of Google or Alphabet, depending on what we like to call them, has only driven about 16 million actual autonomous driving miles.
16 million versus Tesla's 2 billion.
So having a 5G network obviously gives us that pipe to gain that critical, I don't care whether it's Tesla or anybody else, but we have to get that data back so we can make the AI smarter so we have less accidents so that the AI never has to make that decision about who to hit.
So when you have 5G, because we're talking about, I talked to the chairman of, former chairman of the board of GM, and he said GM is, he said, GM's going to be making fleets by 2030.
He said, we're not going to be an automaker as you understand it.
He said, there'll be fleets of pods of whatever they are that will be connected to the system and you'll call for one, blah, blah, blah.
And he said, you know, the highways will be much faster than they are now and things will be much more organized.
That's when all of this comes in.
But when all of this comes in, you have to keep the guy who wants to drive his car himself off the road because I won't be able to merge with this traffic that is all really, you know, done by AI.
I can't navigate.
I'll cause the problem.
So what happens?
How far away are we from that transition to where you're a problem, dude?
You can't drive your car anymore.
Car, yeah, yeah.
I actually think that I think that will be a long way off.
You know, at least I think we've got a good two decades before we start having serious discussions about whether or not we can drive a car.
Huawei Equipment and Global Connectivity Risks00:06:10
And how long before the whole country, you were talking about the lily pads, before the whole country is connected?
Because part of the problem is you go out into the center of the country.
Some of that stuff's not even mapped.
You know what I mean?
Some of that.
So how long before a self-driving car could be used throughout the country?
Yeah, I think, you know, the reality is that when you're building out these networks, it's about percentage of population covered.
So, you know, I talk to people who write into me or come up and ask me and say, hey, Jeff, I don't even have 4G.
I live in a small town of 736 people, and we're still on 3G.
And so the 4G network coverage, believe it or not, is still being built out in some rural areas, not just in the U.S., but around the world.
Within three years, we will have the vast majority.
And when I say vast majority, how long?
Within three years, we will have the vast majority of the U.S. population covered by 5G wireless networks.
Without China technology, Chinese technology.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
There's a very large misunderstanding about the need for, for example, Huawei's equipment.
Huawei's 5G wireless technology is loaded with U.S.-made semiconductors, the real intelligence, high-value products that actually make those products work.
The U.S. doesn't focus on just making an antenna.
So who's giving us the bullcrap story then that we are so far behind?
Huawei is way ahead, and we need this technology.
Europe needs this technology.
It is absolutely not true.
There's three major vendors around the world that produce the physical equipment for 5G networks.
That's Huawei, that's Nokia, Finnish company, and Ericsson, Swedish company.
Those are the big three.
What I'm really talking about is the physical equipment, those transmitters, the antennas, a lot of the IT equipment that helps the 5G networks operate.
But supplemented with that, there's U.S. products inside all of those pieces of equipment.
Again, all those critical semiconductors.
And on top of that, companies like Cisco and Juniper Networks provide Infinera, another favorite of mine, provide the internet routing equipment that enables these 5G networks to operate.
The moment that a signal hits a transmitter in a tower, that tower is attached, connected to a fiber optic network.
Take that signal off, you bring it onto a fiber network, you route it around the world wherever it needs to go, comes back up on a tower and then connects to the other side of the line.
So the U.S. is leading on 5G wireless technology in many regards.
Wow.
Not the impression you would get.
No, exactly.
So how concerned are you, is this really even a concern, that with 5G, the Internet of Things comes alive, right?
I can be in a store and somehow or another, ask my refrigerator what I have, what I need.
I can ask what aisle ketchup is in the supermarket because I'd have access to all of that data because of 5G could get to me quickly, right?
With all of the data in all of our homes, everything in it, gathering information, How concerned are you with the idea that China could take that information and use that information, or anybody can take that information, you know, our own government to monitor and to manipulate?
It has already.
That's the bad news.
It was already determined that Huawei had taken data in the United States.
So information that was routed through its routing equipment, routed that data to mainland China for analysis, and then routed it back to the destination that it was originally intended.
And, you know, that was actually the impetus for current administration's banning of the use of Huawei's equipment in the United States.
It is absolutely a national security concern.
They've also done it on televisions as well.
And that is frightening because that's in our homes.
I, as a technologist, am very careful about the brands that I buy.
A very simple example, if we think about, you know, Facebook just released a TV module and the TV module has audio on it and a camera that it's going to use to listen to our conversations and identify the members of our family and collect information, analyze what we talk about every day and feed that into its massive.
Here's the problem, because I think for the West, Huxley was right.
Orwell was right for the East.
It's 1984 in China.
Especially in the North and for the Uyghurs.
Right.
Yeah, the Muslims.
Horrible.
Yeah, horrible.
But we're kind of just fat and happy, and we're just being, we're being fed that.
When I say to people, and tell me if you think this is wrong, when I say to people, look, you're going to have an idea.
Digital Assistants and Data Custodianship00:08:18
Let's say, you know, you've had a conversation with your wife.
You've had several different things that have been happening in your life.
And you get up one morning and you're like, geez, you know, I just, I think we should just get on a plane and go to Hawaii.
Those reservations most likely will already have been made because AGI will say, you know what?
I've been thinking about or, you know, I've been watching this and I've already made these plans and it would be the plans that you would make.
A, is that in the future?
Completely feasible and not 10 years away.
The ability to do this will happen in the next few years, in fact.
And what it will most likely appear as is a personalized digital assistant that knows your preferences.
Knows you better than you know.
You know yourself.
Exactly.
So when that happens, I mean, what's great about this is everything that the wealthy had, somebody who is their personal assistant, knows and thinking, and like I've got you covered on this.
You can now have most likely for free or for very low cost in the future.
So it's fantastic, but it's also, it knows you.
Where is the beginning and end of free will?
Is that my choice?
Or have I been kind of manipulated into that choice?
Of course.
You're never going to get people to say, oh, I'm not going to use that.
You'll get people to say, that sounds bad, but they'll still use it.
The convenience factor is too high, precisely.
Yeah.
This is where the credibility of the service provider is so important.
Who is a good custodian of our data and information?
And when the best place to look, the easiest place to look and understand that is what's the business model?
How do they make money?
I'll give you an example.
Apple, historically, has been a great custodian of our information.
Why?
Because they don't sell our data for advertising revenues.
Facebook and Google will want you to think that they're magnanimous, that they are here for the greater good of mankind.
Facebook's mission, and I'll paraphrase this, is to empower people to connect and bring the world closer together.
Google's mission, I love this, Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and usable.
It's fantastic.
Sounds wonderful, doesn't it?
Holy girl.
I want more of that.
I do.
I do.
But more than 99% of their revenues come from data surveillance, collecting our most private information, packaging and selling it to anyone, anyone who's willing to pay for it.
That's terrifying.
It is.
And yet, I still use Google.
I don't have Google Home.
You know, I don't.
Nest freaks me out.
Honestly, I would never touch a Nest.
I would never touch a Nest.
Thank you for saying this.
People think I have good friends who are like, Glenn, I'm like, listen, I'm telling you, unless you want all of your conversations, well, we don't have anything.
We're not like you.
We're not celebrities, whatever.
A, I ain't a celebrity.
B, stop thinking that way.
Yes, yeah.
And they don't.
I have good friends who have Nest, who have Google Home.
They talk to it all the time.
It controls everything in their house.
And I'm like, you are going to regret this someday.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Convince them.
Well, you know, first of all, if we had to choose, let's just say basic, basic operating principle is stay away from companies whose business model is collecting and selling your data.
So we named two already, Facebook and Google.
How about Amazon?
Amazon has traditionally been a very good custodian of our data.
So I would put Amazon and Apple in a good bucket for now.
So far, they've been good actors.
But for now.
I hope they stay that way because otherwise we won't have any choices.
But right now, those are the products that I would put in my home and feel comfortable about it.
So instead of a Nest, go with an Eco Bee, which was acquired by Amazon.
So why should you be worried about having the new TV from Facebook?
And so what they're listening to, that's going to provide you with that digital assistant that's going to be able to book your trip to Hawaii and tell you how to pay for it.
Sure.
Just chat with it and it's done.
It's so easy.
Anyone on earth, this is the great thing about both 5G wireless technology and the advancements in artificial intelligence, hardware, and software.
And when I say hardware, I'm referring to specifically semiconductors.
By the next generation of phones that come out, you will have an artificial intelligence enabled supercomputer in your hand capable of running any digital assistant.
The next generation?
Yes, coming out in 2020 within the next 12 months.
And the current forecast for 2020 are at least 300 million 5G enabled handsets.
So the explosion is literally happening in the next 12 months.
We're off to the races.
What is that going to mean?
You mean upside and downside?
Well, you gave a great example of services that were only available to the very wealthy.
Right.
A butler, a personal assistant, will literally be in the hand of anyone who can afford or get access to a smartphone.
And it's not like a calendar service.
It's AI.
It is full-blown AI with the ability to do those tasks that consume, on average, two or three hours of our time a day.
If you had a Centurion black card, an American Express black card, you have access to the concierge.
Concierge, yes.
Your phone will do that, and it'll be easy.
Absolutely.
Natural language.
So, in fact, the last 18 months have been spectacular in terms of the advancements that have been made in what's called NLP or natural language processing, which is the artificial intelligence that's used to understand, interpret, and act upon human speech.
I don't know.
I hear my wife, she uses Alexa.
I've got Alexa, or I've got Siri turned off because she's constantly going, no, Siri, no, call mom.
Call mom.
Those days are shortly.
Oh, yes, those will come to an end very, very soon.
And Apple, ironically, underinvested on artificial intelligence for many years.
They've actually been playing catch up.
Amazon, of all companies, actually has made tremendous progress, as has Google.
Healthcare Portability and Apple's Strategy00:05:49
Reasonable to secure our data by saying, I can sell you my data, but if I move from one place, I take my data with me.
I own my data.
And if I want you to be able to sell it, you could sell it.
I could even sell it in a block with a bunch of other people.
Yes.
You know?
Yes.
But I own my data.
Why don't we, has there ever been anybody who is trying to get that legislation passed?
Because that's the way to cripple companies that are misusing our data.
So I'm glad you brought this up.
There's two interesting developments.
So first of all, this is being talked about, especially with regards to healthcare data, healthcare portability.
I just read somebody's records.
Somebody's already going in and taking our records.
Well, there's a horrific thing that was just announced that's worth talking about, actually.
So Google had been very quietly, secretively working with a major health provider called Ascension in the United States to get access to all of the healthcare records through their medical system.
Millions, millions of records from Ascension.
So this is where it's interesting.
Exactly.
It gets worse because they have the names of the patients.
So it's not anonymized.
They have the complete healthcare record, all of their visits, any procedures that have been done, any diagnoses that might indicate future health conditions, maybe high risk for cancer, for example.
They have the names and the birth dates of everyone.
And it's all under the guise of HIPAA, the 1996 Healthcare Act.
And there's this very nuanced language in HIPAA that says basically the healthcare provider can share the patient data without the physician or the patient's consent, as long as the use of that data is to support the mission of the healthcare facility.
Oh my gosh.
Right, incredibly loose language that was written back in 1996, and it provides for no privacy whatsoever.
And obviously, Google figured this out and struck this deal with Ascension.
And of course, I'm sure the sales pitch was: we have this incredible artificial intelligence technology.
We can help you affect better healthcare outcomes, right?
Sure.
Just give us the data.
We'll take it.
Frightening, right?
And so, of course, the talk in the industry is every American should be able to take all of their healthcare records with them so that when they go to a new provider, they don't have to fill out 100 forms.
They can just provide the data, get everybody up to speed.
Healthcare portability, right?
It's not just insurance, but actually your information.
It's your data.
So there's that initiative that's very kind of industry-focused.
Healthcare seems to be the primary target.
But there's a whole nother group in the technology industry that wants to basically retain all of our data, the data that has been taken from us without consent from companies like Facebook and Google.
Allow us to have our data back and then give us the right, the choice, to opt in or not.
Correct.
And so you mentioned Google before.
There's actually a company out there called Brave.
They have an internet browser, a search engine.
And they have a neat function that allows you to opt in and determine which information you would like to share.
And you can actually get paid for opting into the network.
The way they make those payments is through a digital currency, a form of cryptocurrency.
And if you opt in, you get paid every month small amounts for your participation in the network.
This is reasonable.
It's very reasonable.
And I think, in fact, it's the future.
It's going to take time to unseat Google from their current business model.
But I do believe this will be cracked.
I think we'll be given the choice to whether or not we'd like to opt in our LinkedIn profile or our Facebook profile or our searching.
Ten years ago, I said to Ray Kurzweil, Ray, I know you don't believe by 2030 there will be death.
And he believes in the singularity of man and machine coming together.
And I talked to him about, well, what about free will?
What about being manipulated subtly, especially if they're in your head?
And what makes you believe that if I could make you into a monkey by turning off your access to AI and you're not able to understand everything that's going around, who should have that power to be able to do that?
And he said, well, we would do that.
And I said, okay, well, what would make you think that if I'm trying to come up with a competitor to Google and Google knows I'm doing it because their AI is saying, look what this guy is doing.
Narrow AI vs. General Intelligence Threats00:11:22
A, I'll never beat them because they're monitoring me and they're taking my ideas for free.
And what makes you think that they won't shut him off?
And his response was, well, we just won't.
And I said, Ray, I know the slogan used to be, don't be evil, but people generally go bad when they have that much power.
The power that we're talking about is staggering.
It is staggering.
And we're not even scratching the surface.
I mean, let's go back to quantum computing.
How far are we away from quantum computing really making all encryption, you know, rendering it meaningless, meaningless.
Yeah, yeah.
So for many years, a couple decades, when people refer to kind of military-grade encryption, it's called 256-bit encryption.
That's kind of like the standard for security and encryption technology.
All sorts of nuances around that.
Not very relevant.
The quantum computer that Google built was a 53 was a 53 qubit quantum computer.
It actually was 54, but one of the bits didn't work.
So we had 53 functioning qubits.
At a very high level, the moment that we build, oh, by the way, a 53-bit quantum computer can crack 256-bit encryption, just to be very clear.
How fast?
It'll take some time.
Let's say a matter of hours, maybe more than a day, but it's not a long period of time.
Let's just say loosely less than 48 hours.
This is our starter set.
Yeah.
This is our training wheel.
So imagine the moment, and by the way, we are not far away.
This is what, to your point, I'm incredibly amazed people haven't written about this.
It's not a big leap to get, once you have a functional quantum computer, it's not a big leap to get from 53 to 256.
Right.
The moment you have 256, you can crack that encryption software in milliseconds.
It's over.
And so what I can tell you right now, the industry, especially the cybersecurity industry, is crambling right now because we have a massive problem on our hands and we haven't figured out how to solve it yet.
And we have to do something.
We literally need to have different methods of encryption and security to protect our most vital information.
All of our banking, our security on military, absolutely missile launch, everything.
Corporations, governments, intelligence organizations, you and I, the whole bit.
All right.
Do you believe the singularity is real?
Well, you know, it's a very frightening thought.
The thought that we get to.
So what happens after artificial general intelligence, which let's start here because define AI, AGI, and ASI.
Right.
So right now what we have is narrow AI.
We can take AI and apply it to a very specific task like autonomous driving, and it can train on just that thing, and it could be brilliant at it.
Be better than any human at one thing.
Two billion miles driven, Tesla cars have driven themselves, sometimes with humans sleeping in the seat, documented.
So, you know, we've been there for the last several years.
AGI, I believe, will come within nine years.
My prediction is 2028, which is a rock's throw from where we are today.
And artificial general intelligence is something that, you know, we can't tell at all whether there's a human or an AI on the other end of the line.
If there were a black wall between you and I and we were having this conversation, I would have no idea if I was speaking to you or.
Except if I understand it right.
AI, narrow AI, is one task and it can be much better than you.
Yes.
But once you start to ask it questions about something other than chess or building this car or whatever it is, it has nothing.
So artificial general intelligence is just like humans, that it's good at multiple things.
But is it better than humans in all those things like AI is in that one narrow shaft?
Is that general intelligence?
General intelligence is unrecognizable from a human level of intelligence and has essentially the world of information at its fingertips.
So it is smarter than us.
Or at least the smartest person in the world.
You can think of it as the smartest person in the room.
Super intelligence, artificial superintelligence.
That's my question.
Is where the AI is smarter than the single best human in every aspect of life.
I've heard it described as you're having a birthday party in your kitchen and the cake has been cut and everybody's been eating it and you're over here talking and there's a fly on the plate attracted to the sugar in the cake that's eating.
That fly has no idea what the cake is, sugar is, the plate, the kitchen, the people, no idea.
In that case, we are the fly and ASI, artificial superintelligence, the people.
Would you say that's accurate?
That's an interesting description.
But not accurate?
It's not inaccurate at all.
It's such a, you know, I like to think about it as something that is better than any expert in their field on the face of the earth.
Right.
And it moves so rapidly that you can't understand it.
You can't follow it because it's crunching things so quickly.
And it has the ability to make connections between things that we would think have no connection whatsoever.
So it can synthesize everything, all of the world's information real time.
So let me go back then to what we were talking about.
I'm the driver who wants to take my old Pontiac on the road and it's a superhighway.
When we hit AGI 2028 and it is being able to make many of these connections, I can't keep up with things.
If I want to compete, I need to, Musk just had his, what's a new technology?
It's like a thread, almost a sewing machine into the head.
Yeah.
Basically, the company's called Neuralink.
And yes, it's a brain-computer interface.
Basically, very, very tiny minuscule holes in inserting wires into the brain for the purpose of connectivity.
Correct.
So now I'm connected to the connected world.
I'm connected to AGI, which would give me a great advantage over anybody else.
I mean, you're now in a place to where you literally would be a monkey if you don't have that.
You can't compete.
How far away are we?
I mean, Musk says five years away from his technology being ready.
How far are we away before the real wealthy who are be the ones that get it first in any technology?
How long before some people have that and others don't?
Yeah.
I believe we'll absolutely have that within 10 years.
Oh my God.
And what's interesting about this is actually, and so I believe actually Musk's timeline, because we're doing it already.
So if we think about people that have been injured or wounded.
My daughter has seizures.
She's going in for his is, I think, a thousand or ten thousand times stronger than what they have now.
Sure, sure.
But she's going in for surgery for those implants now to control her epilepsy.
Right, right, right.
So we're connected.
We can now control a robotic prosthesis just through an implant in the brain.
And that's not the same as being connected to a supercomputer or to the cloud, but it's not that big of a leap to think that as our own abilities, this essentially exponential growth in artificial intelligence technology, our ability to design these systems to enable this brain computer interface, it's not a leap to realize that this is a matter of years, not decades.
So I said to Ray, as we talked about this as well, this 10 years ago, what about people who want to be Amish?
Leave me alone.
Leave me alone.
I like me the way I am.
I don't want that connectivity.
You're the guy in the car that can't go.
You'd almost have to be like the Amish with the horses, and you're living over here.
You know what I mean?
Because you're a dummy.
Yeah.
So what happens?
What should we be?
Is anybody talking about some of the philosophical problems that we're going to be facing within 10 years?
There is, to be fair, there is a lot of very thoughtful discourse and discussion about how we're going to deal with this at a societal level.
Jobs Displaced by Predictive Retail Algorithms00:09:04
There's not much being done about it, which is a complaint that I have.
Nobody's even talking to the average person in America.
They're going to be blindsided.
They're not going to see this stuff coming.
I'll give you a good example of a good actor and a proactive, positive action taken by Amazon.
Not surprisingly, I think, actually.
So Amazon has undergone an effort to train tens of thousands of its employees on machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, over the course of the next several years.
Most people don't know this, but Amazon is one of the most prolific artificial intelligence companies on earth.
They use it pervasively throughout their entire business, everything from their logistics business to, I don't know, have you ever been in one of their GO stores?
It's extraordinary.
You walk into the front of the door, you open your Amazon application, you scan it through the gate, you walk in, take a bag, take things off the shelf, whatever you want, and you just walk out the store.
You do nothing.
You do nothing because the entire store is wired with computer vision.
It knows exactly which products you take.
It already knows who you are because it's recognized your face.
And when you walk out, your account is charged instantly.
Completely frictionless.
There are no cashiers in the store.
So they use it for the retail environment.
They use it across their cloud computing systems.
They use it in their recommendation engines for their e-commerce business.
And they recognize that if they don't retrain their workforce, they can't continue the growth trajectory that they're on.
Right.
And you come to a point to where that sounds great.
I want to live in that world.
Yeah.
But what happened?
How are these other people making a living?
What are they doing?
All these jobs have been replaced.
That's wonderful.
And it's one reason why Yang has been interesting to me.
I disagree with his conclusions, but when he's talking about UBI, it doesn't work.
In my opinion, it doesn't work.
Correct.
It won't work.
Correct.
However, at least he's having the conversation of we're going to have the Mark Zuckerbergs on crack cocaine steroids, Nazi kind of experiments to keep the body going.
That person that is really in control of a lot and the money, and I don't see how that's going to change.
And then you're going to have all the people who have just lost their jobs and didn't even see it coming.
How do you make this world work?
Which is jobs.
Yeah.
Does that make sense?
It does.
It completely does.
You know, the way I look at it is we're going to have two buckets of people.
One bucket will be those that are willing to retrain, to willing to literally find a new purpose, a new career.
There will be jobs.
There will be tons of jobs.
There will be economic expansion like we've never seen before.
But we have to be flexible in terms of what we're doing.
If we still want to dig coal, we're in trouble.
That's the second bucket, which is the bucket that says, you know, I've done this for 20 years, and that's all I'm going to do until I retire.
And this is going to be where the societal challenge is because we have jobs that we need to fill.
For example, right now, there are more than 1 million job openings unfilled in artificial intelligence and machine learning, data science.
Unfilled.
There literally aren't people to take those jobs.
And we have people that could potentially fill those jobs if they underwent training.
So what I love about what Amazon is doing, they're being proactive about addressing this issue.
Boy, and they're getting heat like they're an evil company.
Yeah, they're much.
Google and Facebook are.
Yeah, no, Amazon is not evil.
It's creating extraordinary wealth, not only for itself, but for its investors and for its employees.
And it's still growing at that size, a trillion-dollar company.
They're not really, they're not, in the end, they're not a website and they're not a sales company.
They are a predictive shipping company, are they not?
In the end?
You know, everything.
If you think, you know, if we just picture what they built, they built the best smart home speaker on the market.
Everybody thought they were just an e-commerce company.
They just released a fabulous product, a pair of glasses, not too dissimilar than the ones that you wear, normal kind of form factor.
But guess what's inside?
Semiconductor technology and voice recognition technology that allows you to communicate through your smartphone with Alexa.
It is a Trojan horse for carrying Alexa with you all day long.
The story didn't work out.
Figured it out yet.
No, I mean no, but I mean the trojan horse story does yeah, does it work out well?
For well, I think in the case of uh Amazon, it could be uh, incredibly useful, sure to not even have to take the phone out of your pocket, and just the.
The idea too is is I understand it that as soon as Amazon can predict you with 90 accuracy, they'll ship the things to your door before you know you even need it, and And then as long as you're only returning less than 5%, they make money and they close that gap on accuracy, on knowing you.
They will get there.
Right.
They will get there.
And that's who they really want to become.
Yes.
Right?
Yes.
Part of their business.
But we should remember that the part of their business that makes up more than half of their profits and more than half of their free cash flow is their cloud services business.
It's an empire where they basically just lease computing power and storage to any company on earth that doesn't want to build and maintain their own data center, which is most companies.
Amazon can do it far better and far more cheaply than you can do it yourself.
And they've been extraordinary.
They've been adopting the artificial intelligence hardware to basically be the largest provider of artificial intelligence computing power in the world.
And so what they're doing with their cloud services business is actually directly contributing to the advancements that we're seeing in artificial intelligence companies.
So I just talked to somebody on Capitol Hill who said, Glenn, I know you're worried about who gets AI first.
I think anybody who is thinking about this stuff is worried about who gets it first, right?
Putin says whoever arrives at it first pretty much controls everything because you'll be so far up front.
And he said, don't worry.
He said, the government is way ahead.
And I don't necessarily feel good about the government having it either.
But is that right?
Who has the servers?
Who has the muscle to be able to do this?
Is it the government?
Is it Google?
Who has that kind of muscle?
This is really interesting.
Believe it or not, the power and the advancement right now is happening in the private sector.
So did you see the proposal from Chuck Schumer?
This was just a few days ago, proposing that the U.S. government invest 100.
The headline was him asking for the U.S. to invest $100 billion into artificial intelligence so that the U.S. could lead in AI.
Or should dig in a little bit deeper and the funds are going to be spread out like peanut butter like they usually are.
We'll put a little bit in 5G research and some in quantum computing and some over here in cybersecurity and biotechnology and everything.
Nuclear Fusion and the Energy Manhattan Project00:03:25
If you were serious, you would do a Manhattan project on.
There you go.
Yes.
My favorite in that space, and maybe we can get to this later, is actually clean energy, which is nuclear fusion, not fission, fusion, radiation-free.
That is what needs a Manhattan project.
How far away are we from a quantum computer solving that kind of a problem?
So that's exactly, that's one of the most important use cases of quantum computing, which is developing the AI that can control the plasma reaction in a nuclear fusion reactor.
That's the biggest challenge that we have today right now with nuclear fusion, and that quantum computer can help solve that problem.
I'm really excited about that area.
How far away are you?
I believe my prediction on compact nuclear fusion reactors is we will have our first viable net energy producing nuclear fusion reactor within five years.
Oh my gosh.
And I've done a lot of research on this.
What do you mean compact?
Compact, which means let's think about the size of a semi-trailer.
A nuclear fusion reactor the size of a semi-trailer has the ability to produce enough output to fuel 100,000 homes.
Baseload, baseload energy completely clean, no radioactive waste of any kind, no risk of any kind of stuff.
Excuse me for not knowing how this works.
What's its fuel?
Some of the most common elements in the universe, forms of hydrogen.
It's incredible.
One unit of energy in to maintain the reaction will produce six to seven units of energy out.
Wow.
It's incredible.
Why we haven't been investing in this?
The only thing I can think of is that the existing energy industry has kind of been creating friction so that we don't do this.
I think there's also a movement.
You know, I was with GM in 2007, and they let me drive one of their hydrogen cars for a week.
It was the greatest.
It was the greatest.
They didn't have the right size battery yet, but they had everything worked out.
I think it was with Shell that they were going into bed with to make shell stations also hydrogen stations.
Yes, yes.
You can make hydrogen at night, you know, in the downtime of a nuclear plant.
Just make hydrogen.
And the first thing the government did after, you know, TARP and all that crap was go into GM and say, cancel that, Chevy Volt.
Right.
It's very expensive today to make hydrogen fuel.
This is not in defense of not doing it.
We can definitely work on the cost.
We can solve that problem.
Yeah, that's solvable.
Yeah, absolutely.
The only reason we're bringing that up is because I think we've been stalking that deer one way or another for a long time.
Man, stupidity, greed, and politics comes into it.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So back to Schumer in the $100 billion request.
Blockchain Immutability and Monetary Policy00:11:34
Take a guess at how much, this is just in the United States alone, between 2016 and 2018, how much the private sector invested in artificial intelligence companies.
No idea.
Wild guess.
It's got to dwarf what the government said.
So just keep in mind, this is just artificial intelligence.
The venture capital community, private investors funded U.S. artificial intelligence companies to the tune of $105 billion between 2016 and 2018.
And that doesn't include what's been happening in 2019.
2019, I believe, will see even larger numbers.
So more than $50 billion will have been invested in artificial intelligence companies in the United States in 2019, which means over the course of four years, we will have spent something on the order of invested, I should say, $160, $170 billion.
That's how much the private sector has been investing in this technology.
It's extraordinary.
We're not behind.
We're ahead.
All of the intelligence, the best artificial intelligence researchers, where do they want to work?
Here in the United States.
Why?
Because the money's here to invest in these moonshots, to make these incredible breakthroughs in AI technology.
So is it a given to you that it would be Google that gets to AI first because of the amount of information?
So this is a nuanced question, and it's actually very exciting.
The developments in just the last 12 months, there have been some incredible developments on the ability for AI to infer, to use a simpler word, to think, with smaller data sets.
So you're absolutely right.
If I think back to 2017, the only players that were making real progress in artificial intelligence were these large corporations.
Why?
Because they had the largest data sets.
The hardest problem that small companies had is that they couldn't afford to get the large data sets to train their artificial intelligence.
So it wasn't as good.
But this category of artificial intelligence called inference has made incredible strides just in the last 12 months.
And the thing is, when researchers publish new software algorithms that can do these things, they're open and available in the public.
Everybody can see them.
Every motivated and dedicated entrepreneur, every small company has access to the most bleeding edge technology the moment it's been published.
The cat's out of the bag.
We can't stop this from happening because if you need computing resources, what do you do?
You go to Amazon and you rent it for a few seconds, for a few minutes, for a few hours.
Any company can afford that.
And so, which is why these developments are such an inflection point for society right now.
How far ahead, you know, we used to think that China was just a good copier.
They just could copy things.
You know, they weren't imaginative that America had the lock on, or the West, but America primarily had the lock on that entrepreneur, that dreamer, that inventor, and China would steal it and copy it.
But they are stealing and copying, but they're also adding their own things to it that are starting, they're starting to show signs of real ingenuity.
Is that right or wrong?
I concur.
Okay.
Very accurate.
So how are they far ahead of us?
Where are we in the world with them?
How much danger?
And I only say this way.
They are a dark figure in the world, I believe.
And the madness that could be accomplished with this kind of technology in the hands of that kind of a power structure is there wouldn't be a Jew alive on the planet, you know, probably by 1937 if Hitler had anything close to this.
Yeah, absolutely frightening.
And all we have to do is look to what happened in Tibet in the 80s, and now we look at what's happening to the Uyghurs in the north right now.
And nobody is paying attention.
It's absolutely insane.
And it is frightening.
I am very, very deeply, deeply concerned about this.
Where are they ahead?
You know, two really interesting areas are their mobile infrastructure that they put in place.
I'm not talking about the networks themselves, but I'm talking about companies like Alibaba, the China equivalent of Amazon or Tencent and WeChat, their messaging and application platforms.
They've turned them into these incredibly powerful commerce platforms, all on the phone.
Whether you want to book a doctor's appointment or make a bank transfer or chat with a friend or send a message, it doesn't matter.
It all happens through this particular application.
And across these platforms, they have access to roughly, let's just say 85 to 90% of their entire population.
And let's remember, you know, these companies are very tightly linked to the centralized communist Chinese government.
We don't have that in the United States.
They have this pervasive network.
And what's really interesting and very topical right now is they're in the process of launching their own digital currency.
We can think of this as a digital version of the Rennin B.
So the ability to eventually completely eliminate their own fiat currency and go completely digital, a digital reserve currency.
And it won't be long before they start to transition their international trade relationships to that platform as well.
China has been very progressive with something called blockchain technology.
And the U.S. has been very restrictive with a very heavy hand from a regulatory environment.
I've been spending a lot of time in DC being part of that discussion and hopefully trying to influence policymakers in a positive way so that we can actually support innovation in this country with that technology.
Another great example of something being out of the bag.
Blockchain, how's that affected by quantum computing?
Is it still as locked in or not?
Well, the biggest challenge with quantum computing is security.
Right.
Right?
So can it be blockchain is much more than 256.
Well, if you have blockchains that use mining to mine and solve these cryptographic problems, you're pretty much stuffed within two years.
But the great thing is that it's software.
And so it emerges and a new version is released and they can develop new technology to make it resistant to a quantum computing attack.
In the United States, if we decided to go to digital currency, part of the idea of cryptocurrency is I have freedom.
And it's not used politically, per se.
It's not controlled.
It's a limited amount.
I mean, it is the gold standard digitally.
And it frees me up from the governments of the world.
I can take it wherever I want.
I can spend it however I want.
If the United States does digital currency, it doesn't change anything from fiat currencies because they can change the value.
And is there an appetite?
I don't see people in Washington as real cutting edge.
You talk to them about Bitcoin and they probably still don't know much about Bitcoin.
Is that a possibility that we are moving in that direction?
I believe it's inevitable that we do.
So the difference is when you have, and let's take, for example, the Bitcoin blockchain, its own monetary policy is a math equation.
It's predetermined and cannot be changed.
That's the beauty of it.
So does it remain?
Well, most blockchains, the monetary policy of most blockchains are basically immutable.
They're written into the code and cannot be modified.
In the case of the digital Renminbi and let's call it Fedcoin or the EUS dollar or something, the central government would still control that monetary policy.
And the reason I think it's inevitable is that governments are highly incentivized to do it because the thing with Bitcoin is they're not anonymous transactions.
It's an immutable database, an immutable ledger.
You can see exactly which transaction you made on any given day.
And from the beginning of time.
So no transaction is secret whatsoever.
Isn't that attractive for a government?
Religious people would call that the mark of the beast.
Right.
Where you cannot buy, sell without being known, no secrets, all open and controlled by a central power that can find you, track you, do all of it.
I mean, all the things that I remember as a kid being raised in a religious school, that was crazy, that'll never happen.
It's all here.
That's what this is.
It is happening.
It is happening.
And if you think about just something as simple as taxation.
Yeah.
Tracking Every Transaction Without Secrets00:15:04
Right?
If we had every transaction on Federal Reserve-controlled blockchain technology, no transaction would go untaxed.
What would that do to tax revenues if everybody just paid what they were supposed to pay?
No money to be exchanged behind closed doors.
Yeah, it would just be automatic.
So that incentive, that's a powerful incentive for us to migrate towards a digital currency model.
So tell me what you think life will be like.
Well, before I ask you this question, I have no reason other than what I read, and I try to stay up with technology.
But I, in looking at all of these things that are coming, I can't imagine with even the IBM, what is it?
It's not Watson.
What's the doctor version in New York of IBM?
They have the one that's actually on the medical board in New York.
I can't remember its name, but it's good marketing.
But it's tracking cancer and all of the old cancer stuff.
I can't imagine that we're not going to be solving cancer and some massive disease problems that we have now.
Oh, absolutely.
In short order.
Yes, yes.
The medical industry is one of the most obvious and also one of the largest focuses of the industry because it's a perfect problem to solve.
Give me a million x-rays or MRIs, and I'll be able to determine what's wrong better than the best board-certified physicians in the world.
I tell people all the time, by 2030, you're going to beg to not have the human doctor.
Just give me the AI.
Give me the AI.
What is the AI?
I know, Doc.
Thank you.
What is the AI?
Yeah, yeah.
By the way, it's such a powerful augmentation to our human capabilities because you can analyze a million images.
They have already, and most places have already outperformed the best physicians or the best radiologists.
So that's here.
It's actually been solved already.
And it gets better with every month that passes.
Where I really get excited in this particular space is around genetic editing technology and specifically a platform that was discovered back in 2012 called CRISPR.
It's an incredible development.
It came from studying actually bacteria.
But the simplest way to describe it is that it's an enzyme that you can either inject into the body or you can take something out like blood out of you, apply it, and then put it back into the body.
But it can precisely identify a particular area of our genome that has a mutation that is causing some kind of bad condition, and it can either cut it out or replace the mutation with the way our DNA should have been without the mutation.
So we're not making a cyborg.
Literally just correcting an odd mutation that's causing something bad bad cystic fibrosis or blindness or you name it and we're correcting that and it's like us, it's like a software program for for human or animal or food Dna.
It's extraordinary and, in fact um uh, it's incredible time to be talking about this because, as you and I sit here um, patients are being dosed right now for a form of progressive blindness.
People who can't see are being dosed with a crisper treatment directly into the eye.
I know that sounds scary, but if you can't see yeah, it certainly doesn't hurt.
Um, uh and uh, beta thalassema is another uh disease that's being addressed right now.
Um, and it's, it's literally happening.
So we're waiting for the results in the coming weeks uh, from these, uh phase one clinical trials, and I assure you that you know when the news comes out uh, we will see it on every media outlet.
Um, it is such a powerful.
So we have 7,000 roughly diseases that are caused by some kind of genetic mutation, that have no known cure.
Wow.
No therapeutic approach.
And for the first time ever, we actually have the tools to go in and try and solve those problems.
Within 10 years, we will have the ability to actually address the majority of those genetically caused diseases.
So you want to ask me about what it's going to be like 10 years from now?
Our human longevity is going to go through the roof.
We will be living well into our hundreds, healthy, active.
Our brain will be sharp.
Our quality of life will be through the roof.
And we will have the lifestyle of kings from 100 years ago.
I'm incredibly optimistic from a health and longevity standpoint.
These developments are amazing and very exciting to watch.
How optimistic are you on a humanity side?
Before my father died, he said, Glenn, look at technology.
He said, he was born in 1926.
He said, space travel was H.G. Wells stuff.
It was fiction.
We didn't actually think we would go to the moon.
And he said, now look at us.
You know, look where we are in technology.
Now do the same thing.
Look where we were, you know, the times of the Greeks, the Romans, Jesus in philosophy and human decency.
He's like, we haven't really gained that much.
Humans are not, are we ready for this leap?
Are we ready to face, we can't even, we're arguing about whether we can kill a baby, you know, right before birth or shortly after birth.
If we can't get that one down, how are we going to deal with some of the questions that are coming in the future?
What is life?
You know, if I can download you, is that me or not me?
You know, are we ready for this?
We're not ready for this.
We are, and this is not a fault.
As humans, we are predators.
You know, we're, it is almost literally in our DNA to think in a very linear, step-by-step fashion for our survival.
And this is not.
This is exponential, and we're at that point where we're just starting to climb that hockey stick.
And I wouldn't have told you this four years ago, but it has happened right now.
And nobody can get their heads around.
It's not a fault of ours.
We just can't think to that extra.
By 2030, we won't.
There will be so many shots.
And you're already seeing it.
You're already seeing it to every week, if you pay attention.
Every week, there's something like quantum computing that you're like, wait, what?
We hit that?
And the next day it's something else.
And the next day it's something else.
By 2030, we will not be able to keep up with just the profound technological changes.
Right?
It's kind of like, do you remember the moment when hearing the word somebody spent a trillion dollars became as normal as somebody saying you spent a billion dollars?
I say this all the time.
I'll be in a news story and I'll say it was $190 billion or trillion dollars.
I don't even know because it's so massive, you don't even know the difference.
Yeah, it means nothing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so that analogy that you used in terms of the significance and the weight of some of these announcements that are taking place in the world of technology in the frequency that they're being made today.
Today.
Not even, we're at the bottom of the hockey stick.
It's just hard to internalize and to realize how significant they are.
And of course, the impact they're going to have on society.
So change is not something human beings like.
No.
And it causes fear.
Yes.
Fear works to the benefit of those who would like to control others.
How confident are you that we don't see some form of Chinese control, even if it's wrapped up by a corporation or government and corporation, whatever.
How confident are you that we don't enter a world that man cannot get out of?
You know, I would argue today that the U.S. has done a pretty good job.
And let's just use a couple examples.
In China, the latest policy is when you go to get your new driver's license, you have to undergo a facial recognition scan.
So your entire face has to be scanned with high D resolution.
And now you are in the database.
And any camera in the entire country can track where you are at any given time because they can recognize who you are.
In the UK, you know this.
I mean, it's the most plastered country on earth in terms of surveillance cameras.
Talking about 1984, frightening.
But the U.S. hasn't done that.
And that gives me encouragement that we can maintain a much healthier balance in terms of video surveillance and our own freedoms that we enjoy here today.
I mean, it's truly people like you and I and everyone else that fights for this, we have to maintain resolute on ensuring that we don't move in the wrong direction.
We have no choice.
i'm not saying it's easy um i'm not saying that it's not going to all end very badly but look how much we've given up already i know I know.
I mean, I was in the airport and I saw Clear.
Yeah.
People don't understand the power of the retina.
The retina, yeah.
You know what I mean?
You're giving that to people?
I wanted to stand at the clear thing and go, don't do it.
Don't do it.
What are you doing?
People don't understand that when the retina is able to be tracked, everything changes.
Scary, especially if Clear doesn't maintain complete privacy and security of that information.
Yeah, very, very frightening.
You know, one of the other big things I think we absolutely do have to worry about, though, is bioterrorism, you know, related to the topic of genetic editing, because I'll give you a simple example.
There are companies out there that sell CRISPR genetic editing kits for a few hundred dollars.
And anyone.
That doesn't sound like a good idea.
Exactly, precisely.
Anybody can order them online.
You don't have to be certified or have a license or be a physician or a geneticist or anybody.
You can just sign up.
So if I want to be a hairstylist or a manicurist, I have to have a license.
Right.
But if I want to alter the genetic code, go at it.
Wow.
Right.
And so, you know, back to the previous comments of the kind of the cats out of the bag.
What's different today than 20 or 30 years ago is that, you know, very few people, corporations, governments could afford a supercomputer.
Now today, everybody's got one in their hand.
And as you said earlier, everyone has access to the latest download.
Yes.
Everybody has access to that.
So if you are.
The latest open source artificial intelligence, cutting-edge technology, just download it.
It's free for all.
So a friend of mine is Pendillette, who's a deep, deep, deep thinker.
And he has great hope because he said you can't stuff man into chains.
He said, there's just too much information, too much access, too many people to be able to clamp down like that for at least for very long.
You believe that?
I certainly hope he's right.
Me too.
The thing that does concern me, though, is that these, it's kind of like how inflation happens.
How the value of the dollar is stolen, that kind of hidden tax that we experience as we suddenly just press the button and print more and more U.S. dollars.
And then all of a sudden, hockey sticking done.
Right, exactly.
You know, we slowly give away some of our freedoms and our privacy and our information, in most cases, unknowingly, not at the fault of the consumer.
Germline Editing and Confusing Language00:04:53
But we slowly give this away.
And the value that we receive from all these conveniences, and you can imagine how people will feel when they have their own artificial intelligence assistant with them 24 hours a day.
But they come so slowly and kind of so easily and progressively and our life gets better.
Everything's great.
Brave new world.
And then suddenly we wake up one day and say, oh my gosh, what have we done?
How far have we gone?
And how can we recover from this stage?
So A rabbi taught me the true story, the oral tradition of the Tower of Babel story.
And now that we're here, I learned that 15 years ago.
Now that we're here, I think about it almost every day.
Tower of Babel story is, you know, the politician says, hey, let's make bricks and we'll build a tower to the sky.
Well, he's not talking to the people because who is motivated en masse of like, hey, everybody, let's make bricks.
No, you start with, hey, we're going to build this great tower and you got to make some bricks.
He's talking to the elites.
Let's make people into bricks.
We'll mold them all the same instead of stones because we can do anything with that.
We just have to make people into bricks.
Then we're going to build a tower to the sky.
What they were trying to do was to outdo God, et cetera, et cetera.
The kindly God, there's a couple of gods, personalities of God, if you speak Hebrew.
So the kind, gentle, loving, not angry God shows up.
And he says, if they can do this, they can do anything.
And he confuses their language.
So they have to scatter and it all comes apart.
And I thought, our language is binary.
What puts all of this, what if they can do this, they can do anything, is our technology confuse the language and we scatter.
You know what I mean?
Yes, yes.
And it scares me, but it also kind of gives me hope.
You know, that gives you the EMP fear of somebody shutting everything down.
But also maybe the benevolence of if things really did get crazy, that there's some benevolence that would confuse the language to set the world free again.
I don't think man's story ends.
I hope not.
No.
Slavery or even ends here.
No, I am hopeful.
I'll give you a recent example, and it's related to the genetic editing.
The West honestly has been very progressive from my perspective.
So I'm really talking about Western Europe and the U.S. in terms of establishing organizations and ethical frameworks from which we can use this incredibly powerful genetic editing technology.
And they've made great progress on this.
And one of the things that they absolutely will not permit is germline editing, which is going into an embryo and modifying that embryo before the child is born.
Guess what China's done?
Precisely that.
Doesn't South Korea lead the way in some of those spooky things too?
Well, they're doing a lot in stem cell research, definitely.
The germline editing was crossing the line.
And of course, the Western community was up in arms and took a very firm position that was completely unethical and unacceptable to have done that without even knowing what the impact to the child would be.
Of course, for such a nascent technology, having nobody gone through clinical trials yet before we're going to start experimenting with an embryo.
Insane, absolutely crazy.
Mangala ideas with today's technology.
Those risks are not smart.
But so far, Western Europe, the U.S. are really kind of aggressively pursuing these ethical issues associated with these technologies.
And that is definitely encouraging.
We are so over time.
Will you come back?
Ethical Pursuits in Western Europe and US00:01:08
Of course.
I'd love to come back.
And, you know, what you do is help people invest in these things.
And I would love to talk to you about, you know, there's two kinds of for me.
There's two kinds of investing.
There's, you know, buckets.
Yeah.
I need to have something here, but I also want to invest in things I believe in, things that excite me, and the things that could transform wealth a little in the right thing goes a long way, where this is just stable.
Right.
So when you come back, could we talk some more and then talk about what you think are the technologies that you really should pay attention to?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
It's been great to talk to you.
You as well.
Thank you.
Great.
Great fun.
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